Of all aspects of learning/education, the one I value most, without question, is reading.
Reading is the skill I most want my children to learn and to learn to love. I want them to start reading early, read often, and continue reading throughout their lives. I model reading, we read aloud, we buy books often (they’re one of my few shameless impulse buys), we pack their rooms with books. Captain Science could read at 2, could read well independently by 4, and continues to read well above his suggested age level. Tank really wants to read, but isn’t there yet. He has word recognition for a short list of words, but I can see him being ready to actually read by age 5. I’m doing as much as I can to encourage this, because I see so much value in reading at a young age.
I’ve seen a lot of arguments against early reading. I’ve read claims that children aren’t really ready for reading until 8 or later, or that boys usually don’t (or can’t) learn to read until age 7, or that reading before then is actually bad for children. I’ve heard parents talk about gently (or sometimes less-than-gently) steering their children away from reading because they (the parent) didn’t feel the children were ready. The Waldorf method of education actively discourages reading until at least 2nd grade (of course, they also don’t let kids use black crayons, so perhaps let’s not use that as the rudder to guide our discussion). I’ve heard the inevitable, “Well, whether they learn to read early or late, it all evens out by [whatever date they happen to choose from whatever study that confirms their biases].”
Academically speaking, that might be true. Perhaps a student’s reading ability at third, fifth, seventh, or whatever grade is roughly the same whether s/he learned to read at 4 or at 8…on a purely quantifiable level that measures only the reading ability and nothing else. Standardize testing is excellent at quantifiably measuring a single skill out of context. On the level of the heart, the soul, and the creativity, however, I will not accept that early reading doesn’t offer a great and irreplaceable benefit.
A child who learns to read well by 5 has three more years to devour books than the child who learns to read at 8. that’s three more years of beautiful fictions enriching the mind and sparking creativity and curiosity, three more years of absorbing knowledge and storing it away, three extra years of being able to choose a book over a more passive form of entertainment. That’s not nothing. In fact, that’s a pretty damn huge something that early reading offers over late reading.
Now, I love reading to my children. I think it’s a wonderful, educational thing. Read-alouds and audiobooks won’t cut it as an alternative to those additional years of active reading, however. Listening, while more actively imaginative than watching TV and beneficial in its own right, is still much more passive than actually reading. No need to imagine tone or voice. No need to puzzle out unfamiliar words. It’s much less of an exercise for your mind and your imagination. Losing yourself in a book is an experience that has no substitutes. Why on earth would I intentionally keep that from my children?
I think this is an area where Christian homeschoolers seem to, in general, have the right of it much more so than many subsets of secular homeschoolers. Between the unschoolers (“Oh, it’s ok that my 12 year old struggles with reading! She’ll catch up when it’s important to her!”) and the Waldorf-method homeschoolers, we’ve got a nice little chunk of our smallish population that doesn’t place that much emphasis on reading. I don’t know if it’s because the ability to read the Bible is, you know, kind of important to Christianity or because they are more likely to adhere to a more classical form of education, but Christian homeschoolers seems to be much more encouraging of this early reading. Not all of them, of course, but just in a general observation.
I’ll continue to work with my children to help them unlock their reading skills as early as they are able. I’ll encourage them to read often and read well (both in ability and in literature choices). I can no more imagine discouraging reading until age 8 than I could imagine discouraging mobility in a baby, simply because someone else has decided that 5 months is too early to crawl or 9 months is too early to walk. If the seeds of ability are there, don’t smother them. Water them. Will it make a difference in long-term ability? Maybe. Maybe not. Will it make a difference in the richness of their childhoods? Absolutely.
